i haven't been too busy...

i haven't done much here yet except garden work and laying around sleeping (maybe that's not exactly true).

the day i arrived (saturday) the whole day was spent doing the neighborhood apple juice making party - which sounds kind of lame (and a lot of people gave me a hard time about hurrying to get to oregon friday because i should have been enjoying the state and camping and hiking and...), but it was a big operation.

• 2 people grinding the apples (1 feeding them, 1 pushing them through)
• 2-4 people cutting the rotten parts out of the bruised/buggy apples
• 1-3 people loading the pulp, pressing the juice, and tipping the press (i took to this process after i cut myself cutting out the bad apple parts)
• 1-2 people catching the juice that came out of the press into bottles and capping them and putting them with the others.

in all i think we made about 80 gallons of juice and i don't know how much, but probably over a ton of apples were processed. literally.

for the next 2 days my hands were stained black from the oxidized juice bits i got all over my hands from hand pressing the apple pulp initially to get it into the press, where we used a hydraulic jack to quickly press the juice out of the pulp. the hardest part was getting the wooden circular piece of wood out of the round-ish press after i'd squashed it in there so well with the jack. it took some work and a few people, but eventually (like all things) we got good at it once we were about done.

sunday i picked a bunch of hot peppers (serranos and habaneros). spent some time sitting on the bench in the back yard, looking at the garden, with the cat sitting on my lap. i also explored the backyard a little bit; the woodshed, the compost heap, the grape vines, the garden, the rock garden, etc. picked some flowers for the table.

monday i picked a bunch of grapes (2 5-gallon buckets full of white and purple and some white seedless for eating). i also unpacked my car and brougnt all my stuff in. now i just need to figure out where to put it.

monday night we made grape juice (around 1 gallon of white and 1.5 gallons of purple) and hot sauce (with the serranos, habaneros, and some carrot juice, lime juice, onion, garlic, and some other stuff i can't remember right now).

but i haven't been busy...much...